Sonoma Partners Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com Blog

Registration for Convergence 2012 is just around the corner (#CONV12). Registration opens on November 16 and the early registration period ends on January 25. Early registration will save you $300 on the conference fee.

Convergence 2012 is being held in Houston, TX, from March 18 – 21. A little birdie has informed me that you will NOT want to miss the opening Convergence Reception on Sunday night, March 18. Plan your travel schedule accordingly.

In today’s vast world of software products, it’s nearly impossible to find a single platform that can provide all of the business functionality that end users need to accomplish their daily activities. How often do we all need to log onto several different systems throughout the course of the day to get our work done? Typically, these tools never look or function in the same manor, creating a painful end user experience. Rarely do any of these tools communicate with one another leaving information in silos … if only the dots could be connected.

Connecting the Dots

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 takes the first step in connecting commonly used tools together for end users. How many of us use Outlook, Word, and Excel on a daily basis? Is it fair to say that nearly all of us use these tools at a very high frequency? Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 was built to deliver a platform that can be configured to meet your unique business needs while integrating with other commonly used Microsoft products (Office, SharePoint, Lync, and etc). This seamless integration enables users to utilize familiar applications to accomplish their daily activities.

While this seamless integration is important, it doesn’t in itself solve the issue of connecting with your unique business process. Ultimately, these system needs to be altered to meet your needs. Sonoma Partners helps clients take this important next step to not only configure Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to meet your business needs, but also to extend that configuration to the entire business process experience.

Document Assembly & Management Revealed

On a regular basis we are all creating and managing documents, if only they could be connected in some way to the business information and business processes that uses that information. Sonoma Partners has built CRM add-ins for Microsoft Word & Excel that enable users to use these tools in their native setting but allowing them to push and or pull information into Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Office SharePoint. For users, this is critical because it allows them to continue to use the tools that maximize their efficiency, while ensuring that the work they perform is connected to all the key business processes. Preserving a native application experience helps to promote a collaborative experience throughout the organization.

Microsoft Word Generation

In this example, we take a simple status report that we have all either written or received at one point in time. Typically, a status report is written in a Microsoft Word document and distributed to a client. Then, hopefully, the author remembers to save the document in a central file location for broader reference and would finally update their project management system to track key metrics from the status report. By this point the author has likely spent more time saving the status report & updating the project management system than it took to create the initial status report. That is not business productivity!

The Sonoma Partners Word add-in is a CRM accelerator that resides in Microsoft Word that allows the author to easily open Word templates that connect data to and from your CRM database. In the above example, the author would enter the necessary information into the status report, and then click a button to push the data back to CRM. The Add-in also allows you to save the document to SharePoint and then email the update to all appropriate members.

This integration scenario demonstrates a user utilizing a familiar tool, Microsoft Word, while performing multiple business tasks from a single user interface. This creates a simplified user experience while adhering to standardized business processes.

Microsoft Excel Management

Microsoft Excel is the world’s most popular software application to perform data analytics and data manipulation. Often, the challenge is that the Excel data and results aren’t pushed back to any system where it can provide wider organizational value. In this example, we take a project plan that was built and maintained through Excel and show you how to expand the reach through Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The challenge we have found, as it relates to project plans, regardless of the tool, is that the data in the project plan is not actionable through any of the business systems, ultimately limiting its effectiveness.

The Sonoma Partners Excel add-in allows the author to maintain their project plan in their tool of choice, update relevant details (dates, statuses and etc.), then synchronize that content to Microsoft Dynamics CRM where actionable business workflow can be applied. This add-in allows for bi-directional synchronization between Excel and CRM, negating the need for the project plan to always be maintained in Excel because it is stored in CRM. The author simply needs to open Excel, load the data, make the appropriate updates and synchronize with CRM.

Both the Microsoft Word & Excel add-ins highlight examples of enabling users to be more effective while utilizing familiar experiences to gain maximum business productivity. This powerful combination results in increased collaboration, higher end user adoption and adherence to important business processes that will help support a stronger bottom line!

I recently had a customer that was unable to use the native print functionality for a particular entity. Anytime they tried to print (File --> Print Preview) from within the form, they received the following warning "This form has been changed and must be saved before printing":

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This happened even though the user had just opened the form (without making any changes). Even if they saved the form and tried again, they received the exact same warning. The form was perpetually "dirty" thus preventing the ability to print (along with forcing saves on close even when no change was made). We disabled all the javascript we had on the form, and the problem persisted.

I had a colleague whip up some JS that would show me what fields were considered dirty:

I just loaded the form, pasted the above in the address bar and voila - I could see which fields CRM was angry about. (Depending on your browser security settings, you might need to manually type the "javascript:" into the address bar). It turned out CRM didn't like one of my lookup fields on the form. It wasn't immediately obvious why CRM was unhappy, but after further head-scratching and leaning on the experience of my fellow Sonomans we finally figured it out.

The value of the primary attribute of the lookup (generally the name field) contained two consecutive spaces (due to a concatenation issue pre-import). Any time you have a record with 2 or more characters of white space in the name field, and that record is selected in a lookup, Microsoft CRM will think that lookup is dirty. The reason is because CRM tries to be clever around removing extra white space between words. What ends up happening is when it’s checking to see if a lookup is dirty, it checks to see if both the default value and the current value have the same id, typecode, and name. But when it checks the name part, the default value has the correct spacing, and the current value has the trimmed spacing, and so they don’t match and CRM thinks the lookup is dirty.

Here is an example:

You can see that the first name contains many spaces, but above the header where the primary attribute field displays, the extra spaces are removed. The same thing happens on a lookup:

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The fix was quite simple - update the fields to replace consecutive spaces with a single space. While we like that Microsoft included logic to clean up the value, we have submitted a case indicating that the form being dirty in these instances is, in our opinion, a bug. We did some testing in the Microsoft CRM Online environment and it looks like this might already be corrected but some of you on-premise customers might still see this issue.

Many thanks to Bob Lauer, Corey O'Brien, and Rob Montague for helping me get to the bottom of this one!

A colleague of mine started receiving an import error for web resources a few days ago on a client environments, “Web Resource content size is too big”. His scenario was tricky because none of us had ever run into this error before and was working previously. Scouring the forums led us nowhere, but a quick search on MSDN saved the day!

Size Limitations

The maximum size of files that can be uploaded is determined by the Organization.MaxUploadFileSize property. This property is set in the E-mail tab of the System Settings in the application. This setting limits the size of files that can be attached to e-mail messages, notes, and and unfortunately web resources. The default setting is 5MB.

As luck would have it, our client wanted to disallow attachments on notes, so they had correctly updated this property to 0. Unfortunately, since we now know that this property is shared between 3 different areas of functionality, we had to reset it and were able to properly import/update web resources again. Of course, we need to go back and change the setting after each solution update in order to respect the business requirement.

We created a Connect suggestion to alter this behavior. If you agree, vote it up! Hopefully this helps others who may run into this issue in the future.